Briggs: Reopening the economy now won't make people eat at St. Elmo

We’re not quite two weeks into life under the extraordinary measures that have frozen the economy — indeed, several states have yet to adopt them — and momentum is already building behind a case to reopen America.

Voices ranging from President Donald Trump to The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page are growing impatient with the halt on public life and wondering aloud whether the time is coming soon for people to just go back to work. Trump on Tuesday said he wants the country “opened up” by Easter, less than three weeks away.

Those calls are likely to get louder. Gov. Eric Holcomb on Monday, while announcing a new stay-at-home order, said more than 54,000 people filed for unemployment last week in Indiana, a staggering and unprecedented surge that shows how efforts to suppress the novel coronavirus have caused employers to drop workers en masse, as if by pushing a button on a trapdoor. Goldman Sachs is projecting that U.S. unemployment filings could top 2 million in a report scheduled for release Thursday.

The restart-the-economy argument has settled on a catchy, yet crude, rallying cry: Don’t let the cure be worse than the disease. According to this half-baked theory, the long-term consequences of shutting down everything for an indefinite period of time could be worse than letting the coronavirus spread.

Unfortunately for many people, though, the alternative consequence in that scenario would be a death toll that could reach millions and an overloaded health care system — with an economy still constrained by fear and inactivity.

Public health experts are strongly pushing back against calls for a return to regular business. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert and member of Trump’s coronavirus task force who has appeared with the president at press conferences, has reflected the consensus view in advising that strict physical isolation should last for many more weeks, certainly well past Easter.

Yet, it is right to acknowledge the economic suffering that the coronavirus is inflicting and ask how we will transition from the collapse we’re experiencing now to something resembling normalcy.

Get aid now, reopen later

No matter what the coronavirus response timeline turns out to be, we have an immediate economic crisis: Companies, ranging from massive airlines to small restaurants, are barely functioning and have to make decisions now about laying off workers and perhaps even going out of business.

The most immediate aid is going to have to come from government intervention. It’s hard to say with certainty what kind of help will be available because Congress and the Trump administration are still hammering out a stimulus package that is expected to address everything from corporate bailouts to unemployment benefits and direct payments to Americans.

State and local governments have taken some steps, too. Indiana, for example, has banned evictions and foreclosure proceedings during the pandemic to help people avoid the most drastic personal hardships.

Indiana also applied for disaster loan assistance from the U.S. Small Business Association. The application has been approved, which means small businesses and nonprofits can start submitting applications for low-interest loans to help them survive.

The Indy Chamber has created what it is calling a rapid response hub on its website to help businesses answer questions and get assistance, including applying for SBA loans. The Indy Chamber has been working with Mayor Joe Hogsett's administration and the state on aid for local businesses.

Ian Nicolini, the vice president of economic development for the Indy Chamber, said his organization’s guidance to businesses is that they should reach out to their banks for loans and payment deferrals, first, and then turn to the SBA disaster program if they still need financial help.

“If it will help carry you through these challenging times, it’s important you consider applying and seek out the resources that are available,” Nicolini said.

The Indy Chamber, to its credit, has been concentrating on helping companies make it through the pandemic, even as business interests elsewhere have been lobbying against social distancing restrictions. The Michigan Chamber of Commerce, for example, went public with a call for that state’s governor not to issue a stay-at-home order.

There has been little public dissonance between Holcomb and Indiana’s business community even as the governor has moved to close bars and restaurants and then all other businesses considered non-essential.

“Our focus is on how we can help businesses navigate (the coronavirus), but the most important thing is we all take guidance and direction from our public health professionals so we can flatten the curve and not inundate our hospital system,” Nicolini said, adding it’s important to reduce “the amount of damage a public health crisis could inflict.”

How to bring the economy back

The only way to resurrect the economy is by enabling it to function without the threat of a deadly and contagious virus hanging over everyone’s heads.

The case for rushing to reopen everything makes an unrealistic assumption that people would be broadly willing to go back to their offices and eat out, even as deaths related to COVID-19 increase, so long as the government gives a thumbs-up. As Microsoft founder Bill Gates put it Tuesday in an interview with TED, "it’s very tough to say to people, ‘Hey, just keep going to restaurants, go buy new houses, ignore that pile of bodies over in the corner.'"

A premature effort to reignite the economy could cause a dire public health outcome, lengthening the pandemic without even convincing many people to leave their homes and support the businesses that need it. In that scenario, we would fail to get a grip on the coronavirus while also extending the economic pain.

Although the past two weeks have shown us there are some knuckleheads ready to go out no matter what, there might not be enough knuckleheads in America to keep hotels, airlines and restaurants going now. Reopening the economy won’t make people eat Easter dinner at St. Elmo Steak House, a storied Downtown Indianapolis restaurant that U.S. Sen. Todd Young recently invoked while pleading for emergency action on the Senate floor.

The people who are pushing to rev up businesses are right about one thing, though: We shouldn’t be resigned to perpetual shutdown. It’s time to seriously consider what it would take to get past all this.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer and Harvard University physician and economist Alan Garber offered an answer in a New York Times column. They write that if the U.S. can increase testing capacity so that everyone — and not just people with symptoms — can get screened for COVID-19, then it would be possible to isolate cases and let people back out of their homes.

“We could start by screening the general public on a weekly basis,” they write. “It might make sense to test health care and emergency response workers daily. We do not have the capacity to do this now, but all it would take to make this happen is for the federal government to make coronavirus testing an urgent goal and to fund it accordingly.”

This is where reality collides with Trump’s vision of reopening the economy. For now, even people who are presumed to have COVID-19 can’t get tested unless they require hospitalization or happen to play in the NBA. It’s impossible to say how far away we are from a scenario in which testing is so ubiquitous that we can all safely go back to work, but we’re not there yet.

Everyone wants the economy back on track. But, first, we need to cease nonessential activities for more than just a couple weeks, flood the nation with assistance money and ramp up testing. Once all of that happens, we will be in a much better position for a legitimate economic recovery instead of a dangerous false start.

Contact IndyStar metro columnist James Briggs at 317-444-6307. Follow him on Twitter: @JamesEBriggs.